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The Old Testament contains 39 (Protestant) or 46 (Catholic) or more (Orthodox and other) books, divided, very broadly, into the Pentateuch (meaning "five books"), the historical books, the "wisdom" books and the prophets.[3] The difference of seven books between the Catholic and Protestant canons stems from the fact that the early Christians used a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, called the the Septuagint.[4] The Protestant churches later dropped those books which were not accepted by the Jews. The following table shows the arrangement of the holy books in the Jewish Bible and the Old Testament (Jewish bibles count 24 books, as shown here, but Christian bibles divide Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah and the Minor Prophets, bringing the total to 39; books additional to the Hebrew Bible in italics):[5]

The Prophets collection in the Hebrew Bible get its name because the books were attributed to prophets, not because they all contain prophecy. Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, have been moved from the Writings collection in the Hebrew Bible to the History collection in the Old Testament, as the organising principle is subject matter rather than authorship.

The order of the prophets has been reversed in modern Old Testaments so the last words are those of the minor prophet Malachi, predicting the return of the prophet Elijah and "the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD" (Malachi 4:5).

Themes of the Hebrew scriptures

God is consistently depicted as the one who created the world and guides its history. He is not, however, consistently presented as the only god who exists - monotheism apparently only developed around the time of the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BC. Nevertheless, he is always depicted as the only God whom Israel is to worship, and both Jews and Christians have always interpreted the bible as an affirmation of the oneness of God.[7]

The Old Testament also stresses the special relationship between God and his chosen people, Israel. This relationship is expressed in the biblical covenant (contract) between the two, mediated by Moses. The law codes in books such as Exodus and especially Deuteronomy are the terms of the contract: Israel swears faithfulness to Yahweh, and God swears to be Israel's special protector and supporter.[7]

Further themes in the Old Testament include salvation, redemption, judgement, obedience and disobedience, faith and faithfulness, among others. Throughout there is a strong emphasis on ethics and ritual purity, both of which God demands, although some of the prophets and wisdom writers seem to question this, arguing that God demands social justice above purity, and perhaps does not even care about purity at all. The Old Testament's moral code enjoins fairness, intervention on behalf of the vulnerable, and the duty of those in power to administer justice righteously. It forbids murder, bribery and corruption, deceitful trading, and many sexual misdemeanors. All morality is traced back to God, who is the source of all goodness.[8]

The question of evil plays a large part in the Old Testament. The problem the Old Testament authors faced was that a good God must have had just reason for bringing disaster (meaning notably, but not only, the Babylonian exile) upon his people. The theme is played out, with many variations, in books as different as the histories of Kings and Chronicles, the prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and in the wisdom books like Job and Ecclesiates.[8]

Composition of the Hebrew scriptures

The first five books - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, book of Numbers and Deuteronomy - make up the Torah, the story of Israel from the Creation to the death of Moses. Few scholars today doubt that it reached its present form in the Persian period (538-332 BC), and that its authors were the elite of exilic returnees who controlled the Temple at that time.[9] The books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings follow, forming a history of Israel from the conquest of Canaan to the fall of Jerusalem: there is a broad consensus among scholars that these originated as a single work (the so-called "Deuteronomistic history") during the 6th century Babylonian exile.[10] The two Books of Chronicles cover much the same material as the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic history and probably date from the 4th century BC.[11] Chronicles links with the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which were probably finished during the 3rd century BC.[12] Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments contain two (Catholic Old Testament) to four (Orthodox) books of Maccabees, written in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC.

The history books make up around half the total content of the Old Testament. Of the remainder, the books of the various prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and the twelve "minor prophets" - were written between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, with the exception of Jonah and Daniel which are much later,[13] and the "wisdom" and other books - Job, Proverbs and similar books - date from the 5th century BC to the 2nd or 1st, with the exception of some of the psalms.[14]

From scripture to canon: formation of the Old Testament

The interrelationship between various significant ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament, according to the Encyclopaedia Biblica (1903) Some manuscripts are identified by their siglum. LXX here denotes the original Septuagint.

Greek, Latin and Protestant Old Testaments

The process by which scriptures became canons and Bibles was a long one, and its complexities account for the many different Old Testaments which exist today. By about the 5th century BC Jews saw the five books of the Torah (the Old Testament Pentateuch) as having authoritative status; by the 2nd century BC the Prophets had a similar status, although without quite the same level of respect as the Torah; beyond that, the Jewish scriptures were fluid, with different groups seeing authority in different books.[15]

The scriptures were translated into Greek between about 280-130 BC.[16] At this stage (i.e., around the time of Christ) there was no collection of these scriptures - the various texts were read as separate scrolls. It was only in the early centuries of the Christian era that the scriptures began to be bound together into books and that Bibles as we know them today came to be invented. The Greek translations, called the Septuagint, contained several books (using that term loosely) not found in the modern Hebrew Bible (1-2 Esdras, Judith, Tobit, 1-4 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, and numerous additions to other books), based loosely on chronology and "literary typology" (i.e. subject matter).[17] It continues in use to this day as the Old Testament of the Eastern Orthodox Church.[18]

Jerome had wanted to drop all the books that did not appear in the Hebrew Bible, but St Augustine, a bishop and another great scholar of the day, opposed him and won the argument, notably at the Council of Carthage on 28 August 397. In the 16th century the Protestant reformers reopened the debate, and sided with Jerome, but only for their own congregations: yet although Protestant Bibles now have only those books that appear in the Jewish Bible, they have them in the order of the Greek Bible.[23] The Catholic Church, largely in reaction to this attack on tradition, officially adopted a canon, the Canon of Trent, which can be seen as following Augustine's Carthaginian Councils or the Council of Rome,[24] and includes most, but not all, of the Septuagint (3 Ezra and 3 and 4 Maccabees are excluded);[25] the Anglicans after the English Civil War adopted a compromise position, restoring the 39 Articles and keeping the extra books that were excluded by the Westminster Confession of Faith, but only for private study and for reading in churches, while Lutherans kept them for private study, gathered in an appendix as Biblical Apocrypha.[23]

Other versions

While the Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of the Hebrew Bible are the best known Old Testaments, there were others. At much the same time as the Septuagint was being produced, translations were being made into Aramaic, the language of Jews living in Palestine and the Near East and likely the language of Jesus: these are called the Aramaic Targums, from a word meaning "translation", and were used to help Jewish congregations understand their scriptures. For Aramaic Christians there was a Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible called the Peshitta, as well as versions in Coptic (the everyday language of Egypt in the first Christian centuries, descended from ancient Egyptian), Ethiopic (for use in the Ethiopian church, one of the oldest Christian churches), Armenian (Armenia, a former kingdom, now part of modern northeast Turkey, was the first to adopt Christianity as its official religion), and Arabic.[26]

Christian theology and the Old Testament

Christianity is based on the claim that the historical Jesus was also the supernatural Christ, the Saviour. This claim is in turn based on Jewish understandings of the meaning of the Hebrew term Messiah, which, like the Greek "Christ", means "anointed". In the Hebrew Scriptures it describes a king anointed with oil on his accession to the throne: he becomes "The LORD's anointed" or Yahweh's Anointed. By the time of Jesus, some Jews expected that a flesh and blood descendant of David (the "Son of David") would come to establish a real Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem, instead of the Roman province; others stressed the Son of Man, a distinctly other-worldly figure who would appear as a judge at the end of time; and some harmonised the two by expecting a this-worldly messianic kingdom which would last for a set period and be followed by the other-worldly age or World to Come. Some thought the Messiah was already present, but unrecognised due to Israel's sins; some thought that the Messiah would be announced by a fore-runner, probably Elijah (as promised by the prophet Malachi, whose book now ends the Old Testament and precedes Mark's account of John the Baptist). None predicted a Messiah who suffers and dies for the sins of all the people.[27] The story of Jesus' death therefore involved a profound shift in meaning from the tradition of the Old Testament.[28]

The name "Old Testament" reflects Christianity's understanding of itself as the fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophesy of a New Covenant (which is similar to "testament" and often conflated) to replace the existing covenant between God and Israel (Jeremiah 31:31).[1] The emphasis, however, has shifted from Judaism's understanding of the covenant as an eternal contract between God and Israel to one between God and those who are "in Christ".[29]

In Hebrew, God has a name, namely YHWH. As Hebrew was originally written without vowels it is generally pronounced in English as Yahweh. The Hellenised Jews who produced the Septuagint translated this as kyrios, meaning "Lord". This produced a crucial change of meaning: Yahweh, the national god of the Israelites, became the universal Lord.[30]

^"Book of Judith". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913.: Canonicity: "..."the Synod of Nicaea is said to have accounted it as Sacred Scripture" (Praef. in Lib.). It is true that no such declaration is to be found in the Canons of Nicaea, and it is uncertain whether St. Jerome is referring to the use made of the book in the discussions of the council, or whether he was misled by some spurious canons attributed to that council"

Sprinkle, Joe M. Biblical Law and Its Relevance: A Christian Understanding and Ethical Application for Today of the Mosaic Regulations. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006. ISBN 0-7618-3371-4 (clothbound) and ISBN 0-7618-3372-2 (paperback)